The D Dock Curse.(The Talk of the Town)

There's something about politicians and boats. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated, all records of his visits to the Presidential yacht Sequoia were burned in an oil drum. A photograph of Donna Rice sitting on Senator Gary Hart's knee aboard the Monkey Business doomed his Presidential campaign. Former Representative James Traficant is serving eight years in prison for tax evasion, racketeering, and taking bribes, including thousands of dollars in repairs for his yacht. Before former Representative Robert Ney went to prison for accepting gifts from the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, he docked his fifty-four-foot yacht, Cong Won, at the Gangplank Marina. And Abramoff himself was convicted of fraud in the purchase of, among other things, a fleet of gaming boats.

But, amid the ruckus that followed the arrest of Senator Larry Craig for allegedly soliciting sex from a plainclothes officer in an airport rest room, little attention was paid to his unusual Washington, D.C., address: 1000 Water Street. There, across the Washington Channel from the Jefferson Memorial, is the Capital Yacht Club, where Craig lives on a forty-two-foot Bertram yacht called the Suz II, named for his wife, Suzanne, who stays back home in Idaho. Craig, a fastidious man who was known to pick up trash around the club, is well liked by his fellow-yachtsmen. (Explaining his behavior in the airport stall, he told the police that he had bent down to pick up a piece of paper.) "He is a creature of habit," a club member said recently. In the weeks during which Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and then started trying to withdraw the plea, the Suz II floated empty in its slip at D Dock.

Craig's boat shares D Dock with the Cw S Way, a thirty-eight-foot Chris-Craft out of Valdez, Alaska. That boat's owner is Senator Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate. In July, federal agents raided Stevens's home outside Anchorage; now the F.B.I. is investigating whether he took illegal gifts from an oil-field-services company. (Stevens denies any wrongdoing.) Craig sponsored Stevens for membership in ...